It was a six-word sentence that had three of the four members of my golf foursome — me included — cracking up with laughter during our outing at Winchester Country Club in Virginia, where I worked for a couple of summers during my late teens in the mid-1990s.

Making $4.25 an hour picking range balls, parking carts and cleaning golf clubs wasn't exactly glory work, but the perks included playing nine holes in the evening if time allowed. One time, I joined two of my co-workers — school buddies John and J.T. — for a nine-hole outing with our assistant pro Dave, whose penchant for wisecracks we all knew well.

It didn't take long before we figured out that J.T. couldn't play a lick of golf. What made us all roll our eyes was the fact that J.T. would take four or five methodical practice swings before taking a real swing, which resulted in an explosion of dirt and grass and the ball traveling about 10 feet.

This happened over and over and over again. Biting out tongues, we pressed on.

Finally, after about 10 minutes of witnessing this butchery on the first fairway, Dave couldn't take it any more. Red-faced, he interrupted J.T. as he addressed the ball for a lesson in brutal honesty. 

"If you suck, just hit it," Dave said. 

In the game of golf, better advice has never been given. 

Here's some other funny sports moments from my childhood that I hope bring a smile to your face: 

• Growing up in New Jersey as a young kid, a neighborhood community pool served as as a popular spot for our family during the summers. As a pretty decent swimmer, I competing in age-group races.

I was probably seven at the time when I remember racing in the backstroke against five or six other kids. There I am, throwing my arms back, trying frantically to get to the other side of the pool. I can hear the crowd cheering, getting louder. I'm starting to tire out and start wondering why it's taking me so long to reach the wall.

As it turns out, I'd veered off course, so much so that I ended up in the middle of the deep end of the pool where the diving boards were located. As it turns out, all that cheering I heard were parents trying to steer me in the right direction.

• Fourth grade, playing little league baseball in New Jersey and I'm pitching for the first time. I'm nervous and can't find the strike zone for anything. Finally, I get one over the plate and the batter hits one toward our first baseman. I see he is trying to make a throw toward third base to get the lead runner, so I turn away from him to see if we're going to get the out or not. 

Well, we did not get the out — because our first baseman hit me squarely in the back with the throw because I never moved from the mound. I remember crumpling to the ground in pain and the resulting bruise from the baseball.

Talk about your scene straight out of The Bad News Bears. It hurt at the time, but it seems funny to me now, my lack of awareness.

• During high school in Virginia, I used to play basketball with a kid, Jesse, who was a few grades younger and lived a few homes down from me. He had a backboard attached to his garage that I'm guessing was about nine feet high, so it allowed me to "gently" dunk the ball (never could quite dunk on the standard 10-foot rims). 

One day, Jesse had a classmate over at his house and they both wanted to see my best dunk attempt, so I tried breaking out some sort of Michael Jordan windmill dunk. 

The next thing I know, the entire lower section of the backboard cracks and breaks. Talk about being mortified. Again, it's something I can laugh about now. It wasn't funny at the time.

"It's not meant for that," I remember Jesse's dad telling me after he witnessed the scene of the crime.

My family offered to pay for a new backboard, but Jesse got a new one for Christmas and it all worked out in the end. We put a new rule in place: absolutely no dunking allowed.
